Being Bios in Zoe and Zoe in Bios: Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood as a Critique of Agamben’s Model of Biopolitics

Abstract

Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood is a proposer of unexamined possibilities in Agamben that relates to the location of the human in modern democracies. Joining issue with Agamben about the constitution of modern man as the paradox of bios/zoe, this paper alludes to thick situations in the novel to establish that a person can exist as pure bios by surpassing de-politicization, and they also might deteriorate into pure zoe irrespective of the guaranteed political rights. The uncanny is, here, explained by mapping the doubled-edged subnational discourse of secessionism and discriminatory exclusion in Bitter Wormwood. Though the nation-state attempts a forcible inclusion of the Nagas through its exclusionary practices of legal suspension and enactment of counter-insurgency laws, the novel posits that the seceding Naga communities continue to exist in their spiritual sphere of bios, which is Naga consciousness. The same novel discusses the relegation of the politically entitled North-Easterners to a mere biological animal through the portrayal of their discrimination in New Delhi, the capital of India. Thus, Kire’s novel stands in as a critique of Agamben’s overestimation of law as the constituting element of biopolitics.

Keywords:

• Subnationaliam
• bios/zoe
• exception
• normalization
• North-East India

Notes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Telangana is a newly created state (2014) in the Indian Union, which is carved out from Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Pradesh was formed in the year 1953 to redress the demands of the Telugu speaking people. But the successful Telugu subnational state, once again, encountered another subnational uprising from one section for the further creation of a new state called Telangana. The rationale behind the demand was attributed to the distinct cultural identity that the Telangana region inherits from the rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad.

2 Indian Express, an English language daily, was founded by Ramnath Goenka in the year 1930. Currently, it is printed from fourteen centres countrywide. After the death of the founder, the division in the family created a split in the newspaper as Indian Express (Northern Edition) and New Indian Express, Southern Edition (Kaminsky and Long 2011, 340).

3 Rashtriya Rifle attack happened on 5th of March 1995 in Nagaland. It was an attack perpetrated by Indian army fearing an ambush from the Underground.

4 “The material is the domain of ‘outside’ of the economy and the state craft….” (Chatterjee 1993, 6)

5 “The spiritual…is an ‘inner’ domain bearing the essential marks of cultural identity” (1993, 6).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muthukumar Manickam

Muthukumar Manickam is a Research Scholar working on Nationalism with a focus on the representation of the North-East. He studies the points of intersection between Nationalism and Subnationalism. He has published articles in Archiv Orientalni (Oriental Institute Prague) and Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and History of Ideas (Johns Hopkins University).

Vinod Balakrishnan

Vinod Balakrishnan teaches Creative Writing and Communication. He is a motivational speaker, practising poet, and yoga enthusiast. He reads on Life Writing, Nation, Indian Writing in English, Cultural Representation. He has published articles in a/b (Taylor & Francis), Pragmatism Today (Central European Pragmatist Forum), Journal of Somaesthetics (Aalborg University), Lit Crit (University of Kerala) and European Journal of Humour Research. He has also contributed chapters in various edited volumes published by Springer, Bloomsbury, and Brill.